Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. This will continue while the coronavirus situation hinders public access to exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Darcie Book: Material World at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Dates: February 29 – March 28, 2020.
From the artist: “I view my studio as a laboratory where I develop innovative processes to explore acrylic paint as a sculptural material. My work pushes the boundaries and possibilities of painting by navigating the realms between the two- and three-dimensional. The sculptural paintings keep intact the vitality that wet paint possesses as raw material. Paint protrudes into space and defies gravity, appearing to ooze or flow as it makes its departure from the two-dimensional picture plane. While my work embodies a sense of the otherworldly, I am interested in how the heightened physicality of the paint may generate corporeal resonance and elicit desire or longing.
My practice is driven by a love for material and process. I’m interested in how art objects relate to the human body and may spark an appreciation of one’s own physical existence. My process involves pouring thick pools of acrylic paint onto plastic sheeting. Once the pooled paint dries, I peel the skin- or fabric-like material off the plastic, then use it to form three-dimensional objects. Utilizing different sculptural approaches at a wide range of scales, I create paintings executed in space in which the viewer becomes a participant.
My work invites the viewer to share the sense of discovery I experience in the studio. The viewer-participant is rewarded for physically moving around the works: hidden details are revealed upon closer examination, and the compositions of the paintings change when seen from different vantage points.”
Darcie Book, who lives in Austin, Texas, is a sculptural painter and installation artist whose work explores paint as object and architecture through innovative processes using acrylic paint. Book’s extensive exhibition history includes the Baltimore Museum of Art, Fort Works Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Los Angeles, California, DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, and Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas. She has been published in Sculpture magazine and the Manifest International Painting Annual. Artist residencies include the Vermont Studio Center and the Facebook AIR Program. Book is a member of ICOSA Collective, an artist-run nonprofit cooperative gallery in Austin, Texas. She recently completed her first outdoor public artwork Wavelength, commissioned by the City of Austin, Art in Public Places.
